The present invention relates to a vehicle driving support system which provides a driver with reference information for driving a vehicle by detecting and processing environmental conditions around the vehicle.
There have been various automatic tracking control systems which detect the speed of a preceding vehicle and determine the distance between the subject and the preceding vehicle, that is the inter-vehicle distance, based on the detected speed, and which maintain the distance between the two vehicles in order to support long-distance driving with safety.
Such a system is already disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 3-295000 (1991).
There also have been alarm systems which detect the distance between a vehicle and a preceding vehicle and which produce an alarm to caution the driver against a rear-end collision. Such alarm systems are described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 4-201641 (1992) and No. 4-201643 (1992).
The systems mentioned above will be useful when vehicles are continuously running on ordinary roads or highways. From a running mode point of view, however, vehicles are driven more often in a congestion running mode on ordinary streets than in a high speed running mode on highways. When they are being driven on ordinary streets, they are generally forced to repeat stopping and slow running due to traffic signals and congestion. A driver, therefore, is kept busy when a vehicle is driven in the congestion running mode, and has to keep watching the driving state of the preceding vehicle, as well as watching the state of the street beyond the preceding vehicle. In such a situation, the mental and physical burdens imposed on the driver will be considerable.
Now, there are a lot of cases where a driver runs a vehicle in a narrow space, such as in a narrow passage in a downtown area, in a narrow parking lot or in a garage. In order to perform such driving reliably, a well experienced and skillful driving technique is indispensable. Especially, for beginners, drivers in name only, and physically handicapped persons, such driving conditions present a most difficult task. They have to bear both mental and physical stresses from such driving.
The control system and the alarm system in the systems described above have no support function for a driving operation in a congestion running mode or a narrow space running mode.